Increased Installer Size in LabVIEW 8.5

[CaseyM]

I have an installer for an application I wrote in LabVIEW 8.5.1 that includes nothing but the application itself and the LabVIEW RTE.  It used to weigh in at ~75 MB, but since I installed LabVIEW 2009 the installer now takes up ~115 MB.  I poked around some and it appears as though some of the extra space is being used to include 64-bit compatibility, but is there anything else going on here?  Can I set any options to reduce the size to something closer to the original or is this something I'm stuck with?

Message Edited by Casey May on 09-03-2009 02:12 PM

[CaseyM]

Also, in case it wasn't clear, I'm still building the installer using 8.5.1.

[iZACHdx]

Hello,

I'm unsure why you may have had a previous installer at only 75MB. The run-time engine itself is around 97MB so the installer you are creating seems to be an appropriate size since it has to include these files. I tried creating an installer in 8.5.1 using a blank VI and the run-time and the file ended up to be  t at 97MB. What happens if you create an installer of the run-time engine only? Do you get the expected size?

-Zach

[rolfk]

Did you test that on a machine where no LabVIEW 2009 was installed?

When I build a LabVIEW installer in 8.5 on a machine where only LabVIEW versions up to 8.6 are installed I get a size for the installer volume of about 69MB (and everytime I do a build, also a prompt to insert the disk drive from which I installed the LabVIEW 8.6.1 update!)

What I guess happens here is that LabVIEW 2009 installs various shared component installers onto a machine that get picked up as dependencies by earlier LabVIEW runtime installers. For me this is not an big issue as long as this causes no problems when installing, due to binary incompatibilities between component versions.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[CaseyM]

I see the same behavior Rolf sees without the prompt for the 8.6.1 disc.

[battler.]

My installer has more than doubled in size from 8.X to 2009.  It is now around 130Mb.  That's just too big.

Is it correct then that the RTE size for LV 2009 has increased substantially?

Why is this?  Is there a work-around?

[iZACHdx]

Hello,

I have been working on testing this out and was finally able to duplicate this issue. The installation of the LabVIEW 2009 Run-Time Engine does affect the size of the installer on 8.5.1. The RTE for 2009 is bigger at 161MB due to the added features and functionality of LabVIEW 2009. At this point, there is no work-around to get the 8.5.1 installer back to the smaller size you were seeing earlier. Is there any specific reason where the size is absolutely critical to your application?

-Zach

[CaseyM]

It's not "critical" but file size was an issue with my clients so it will require some explaining.  What features and functionality were added causing this size increase in the 8.5.1 RTE?

[iZACHdx]

Hello,

I brought this issue up with R&D and the only "workaround" would be to either unistall everything and start over with 8.5.1 or to keep 8.5.1 and 2009 on separate partitions and directories. The 2009 RTE is updating components such as shared variable support etc that is used with any run-time engne. The run-time engine pulls files from these folders in order to create the installer and is what causes the increase in size that you are seeing. I'm sorry that the increase in file size bothers all of you and we do our best to keep things as small in size as possible. Even so, it is inevitable that the size will be increased in order to update all the different components and also retain compatibility between different versions.

-Zach

[battler.]

Hi there,

It is an issue when the client must download the application from a website.  Our application has tripled in size.

A lot of capability of the RTE is often redundant; there are components which it has the ability to interpret which I have not used in my applications.

The RTE should be built along with the exe in a modular fashion to keep it as small as possible, or at least there should be the option.

Battler.